Singer/actress SZA (Solána Imani Row) recently appeared as Catwoman in State Farm's "Batman vs. Bateman" commercial, and the One of The Days star has now set her sights on another comic book character - and she is certainly aiming high.
SZA appeared on The Jennifer Hudson Show and threw her hat in the ring to play one of the most powerful superheroes in Marvel Comics, the X-Men's Ororo Munroe, aka Storm.
"I would love to be a superhero," SZA said when asked if there might be a Marvel or DC role in her future. "[Storm] comes from this whole other place where it's the jungle ... So, I think that would be so gnarly if I could be Storm's origin story."
"My dad collects first-edition comics, so he has the first-edition Thor comics and Silver Surfer just in the basement," she added.
SZA doesn't have much acting experience, but she picked up a lot of acclaim for her performance in recent comedy One of Them Days alongside Keke Palmer, who has expressed interest in playing Rogue on a number of occasions.
Storm has previously been played in live-action by Halle Berry in the original 20th Century Fox movies and Alexandra Shipp in X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix. The character is expected to be a part of the new MCU team, and we have heard that the studio is interested in Wicked star Cynthia Erivo for the role.
Though Marvel does (finally) appear to be making progress on the elusive X-Men reboot, official updates have been few and far between. All we know for sure is that Michael Lesslie is currently working on the script, and that a director is being sought.
If some of the X-Men make their debut in the next Avengers movies (which they are rumored to do), there's a chance we could get some official casting news fairly soon.
During a recent interview with Discussing Film, Kevin Feige was asked how it feels knowing that "we’re closer to seeing the X-Men and Avengers together on the big screen."
"It is extremely emotional, on a personal level, to have done a movie with Hugh after 25 years and me being a small part of that first X-Men movie. And knowing that, thanks to various corporate studio entity deals, we now have 1000s of characters back — characters I hadn’t frankly thought about in many years because we didn’t have the rights to them. Now that we do, it is great fun thinking [about who we can finally]. Our animated series X-Men ’97 was sort of the first taste of people reuniting with the X-Men mythology and that storyline. The response to that series just further excited us about how to bring the soap opera and the saga of the mutants to the MCU."